"Americans" (to clarify: specifically the ones that reside in one of the 50 states currently known as the United States of America) are very naïve. They don't want to see the involvement of the United States in destruction and torture over the years. The United States likes to see itself with a halo on its head, and whenever a revelation like Abu Ghraib or My Lai and now Fallujah surfaces, U.S. citizens tend to shrug it off as an anomaly. When you look at the last fifty years of U.S. history, it is anything but. From Greece to Iran to Indonesia to Vietnam and throughout Latin America, the U.S. government has been complicit in the torture or murder of hundreds of thousands of people.
Memory is a prerequisite for morality. Americans lack memory, they are amnesiacs. The writer Ariel Dorfman calls such historical amnesia a "false innocence." It is entirely functional to the sort of empire that the United States has become. It is true that the media does not serve up enough analysis and information to allow people here to judge what is happening. But it is also true that too many people are willingly blinding themselves to truths that are looking them in the face. They are too busy watching reality television and Desperate Housewives. Violence is an integral part of being an empire. We are the beneficiaries of an empire, and the empire rests on a number of props that we don't care to look at. Torture and violence has been and will continue to be, one of the main tools.
If "Americans" (again: specifically the ones that reside in one of the 50 states currently known as the United States of America) were to truly acknowledge what is being done in their name, they would have to change the way they live and remember, work and play. Or give up seeing themselves as ethical. Do you see that happening?
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